Change comes at you
Sometimes it's orderly and sometimes it's random, but just wait for ...The SINGULARITY
Here’s a nice graph. Compound interest - the interest your money earns is added to the initial investment or principal and the growth curve goes up, changing over time with an ever-steeper slope the longer you don’t mess with it. Quadruple your money and put your feet up in 20 years.
Up and to the right, very nice. A timescale you can live with, a curve you can predict. Orderly change.
This is the way. It’s how we’re taught to measure growth and big business and big tech are all about Growth. Inflection points, paradigm shifts, hockeysticks, 10X, exponential growth, Moore’s Law!
Moore’s law is the one where the number of transistors in a chip doubles every couple of years. That kind of growth is the best kind of growth and it’s called exponential. Change happens so quickly you have to use a logarithmic scale for the horizontal axis where each increment increases by a factor like 10, just to keep the line from growing off the page.
The last five years I was at Microsoft, growth was all I thought about. It was the solitary purpose of my teams. How could we get more users? MAU or Monthly Active Users was our currency and we graphed and counted it obsessively measuring the success of our campaigns to increase it.
Our growth curves were nice enough, and they got nicer as the product got better. Then a completely unforeseen event happened. The world went into lockdown due to a novel coronavirus out of Wuhan China.
All of a sudden, everyone needed our product. Holey Hockey Stick Batman. A hockey stick graph is when growth goes from relatively flat to nearly vertical due to the speed of change.
We sure didn’t see that coming and we sure weren’t ready to meet the demand.
Change isn’t always orderly.
The Pandemic was a catalyst for change on a massive scale.
Unplanned, seemingly random events happen all the time, always creating or accelerating change. How about a monster meteor the size of Manhattan smacking the Earth. The dinosaurs didn’t see that one coming and man did it rock their world.
Nature is full of such surprises. Spring has sprung here in Sonoma County, and I see it everywhere - trees, flowers, grapevines - dormant the past 6 months, now blowing up in bloom. Change follows with noses to blow, grapes to pick. How about the Sylingarfell Volcano in Iceland that keeps erupting this year messing with all the people in nearby Grindavik?
How about 600 million years ago when the first multicellular life popped up? Now that was a paradigm shift - without that random change, we don’t exist.
Let’s pan waaay back to look at things from the Earth’s timescale. 600 million years ago we got multiple cell organisms, but Geologists figure the earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years. Humans - Homo sapiens - have been around for about 200,000 years.
If we condense Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history into a single year it would go something like this:
January 1st: Earth forms.
Mid-March: Life begins.
December 31st, 11:59:30 PM: Modern humans appear.
December 31st, 11:59:59 PM: Recorded history starts.
Humanity gets the last 30 seconds of the year and that last second represents all the knowledge we’ve gained and all the things we’ve created.
We humans certainly contribute our share of unforeseen events, and in our increasingly complex, interconnected world we should expect more. How about the Dali container ship from Singapore unexpectedly losing power right before it went under the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and knocking it over on Tuesday? A lot of unforeseen changes just got triggered, starting with the 40,000 people that used to cross that bridge every day.
Unexpected change, disorderly change.
The rate of human created change is increasing, especially technological change. Take one example - Electricity or Electrification. Started in the 1880s, development of the electric grid and the power generation that feeds it took us into the 1980s or about 100 years. Compare that to smartphones which developed roughly over the past 20 years. Tech is changing ever faster.
That brings us to the Technological Singularity.
I haven’t written about the Singularity so far because it’s a bit cultish, a bit of voodoo. It’s the premise that once we have created AI that’s smarter than us - often called AGI or Artificial General Intelligence - humanity will enter a cycle of change so rapid that there is no coming back or predicting what happens after that point.
It’s great science fiction fodder and the author who popularized it, Vernor Vinge died last week, so a bit of a tribute.
Whether you buy into the Singularity or not it’s a really interesting idea and if you’ve ever written a line of code, you know the power of computers to recursively solve problems and can see the possibilty of a future change that kicks off a spiral of learning that will make humanities second on Earth one to remember.
Talk of change always take me back to this Frank Herbert quote from the super campy original 1984 Dune movie scene where Duke Leto Atreides and Paul Atreides are having a father & son moment before they leave their water planet home for the desert planet Arrakis:
Without change, something sleeps inside of us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken!
best, Andrew
Check out last week’s article!
